There is something I have been meaning to tell you about fear.
She is not who you think she is.
I know how she appears when she arrives — uninvited, as she always does, at the threshold of your most important moments. Draped in dread. Wrapped in the kind of heavy, shapeless, unsightly garments that obscure everything beautiful beneath them. She makes herself large and disfiguring, and you recoil, as anyone would, as from a king cobra. She is ugly and threatening.
But I have learned something about her. Something that took me far too long to understand, and that I wish someone had whispered to me in the early years, in the moments when I let her turn me back from the doors I was meant to walk through.
She is not your enemy.
She never was.
She is courage — your own courage — wearing the wrong clothes. Courage concealed in cowardice.
Think of it. That trembling you feel at the edge of something new, something large, something that matters deeply — that is not weakness announcing itself. That is the electricity of a woman who cares. It is the vibration of something alive and significant stirring in your chest, desperate to be born, wearing fear as its traveling clothes because it has not yet learned that it is safe to be seen.
If only I had looked closer, in those early years. If only I had been still enough, curious enough to look past the disfiguring garments and ask — what are you really trying to tell me?
Because fear, when you disrobe her — when you gently, firmly, lovingly remove the layers of dread and avoidance that she has wrapped herself in — reveals something breathtaking underneath.
She reveals your courage.
Your magnificent, waiting, entirely-ready-for-you, raring to go courage.
She has been there all along, you see. Hidden not from you by any outside force, but by the very intensity of her own longing, because the things we want most arrive dressed in the clothes of the things we fear most. The dream and the dread are sisters. The doubt and the triumph are cousins. The calling and the terror are two sides of the same sacred coin.
And so the next time fear arrives at your door — and she will — do not slam it shut. Do not turn away. Do not let her disfiguring clothes convince you that she has come to destroy you.
Invite her in. She’s the uninvited guest that when shown the proper hospitality, becomes a true, unforgettable friend.
So look closer.
Disrobe her.
Find the courage she has been concealing, the same way she, in her truest self, would help you unveil your own greatness — if only you were willing to see past what she was wearing. Knowing this, will clothe you in gold.
She came to help you.
She always did. 💖
SHE WAS WEARING THE WRONG CLOTHES
